Neighbor objects to TP hotel plans
By Jaime Frusetta
Location, location, location. This credo is a realtor’s biggest
selling point. Well, I’m here to tell you that building the largest
hotel in San Benito County in a residentially zoned lot completely
surrounded by single-family homes and our kids’ bike path to school
is wrong, wrong, wrong!
Neighbor objects to TP hotel plans
By Jaime Frusetta
Location, location, location. This credo is a realtor’s biggest selling point. Well, I’m here to tell you that building the largest hotel in San Benito County in a residentially zoned lot completely surrounded by single-family homes and our kids’ bike path to school is wrong, wrong, wrong!
To give you a good idea about how large and inappropriately placed this hotel would be, I’d like to compare it to the Best Western San Benito Inn on San Felipe Road, which has 42 rooms. The proposed hotel in Tres Pinos is even bigger, with 44 rooms. Just imagine that concrete monster next to your own home.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for expanding tourism and the wine industry here in San Benito County. It’s good for the county, and I agree whole-heartedly. I freely admit to enjoying a glass or two of pinot noir on occasion myself. However, putting the largest hotel in the county in the wrong place is not making things right for the county, or the residents of Tres Pinos. A huge project like this deserves thought and long-range planning. Plunking it down in a residential neighborhood simply because the developer bought the lot cheaply is short-sighted. The county general plan does not call for a large commercial hotel to be built in a residential single-family neighborhood, and for very good reasons.
Please, bear with me while I give you just a few examples of some of the problems with this project:
– The proposed lot for the project is zoned for single-family homes.
– The developer has disregarded, disobeyed and disrespected Tres Pinos Water District ordinances. A well was drilled against TPWD ordinances and an illegal septic tank is being proposed against TPWD ordinances. (San Benito County Water District allowed the developer to drill the well, but it is only permitted for personal and private use.) Tres Pinos residents responded by circulating a petition, which resulted in 81 percent of the residential water connections signing against the hotel and its negative impacts to the district. (One vote per hook-up.) Tres Pinos Water District itself has passed two resolutions against this project.
– There is considerable potential danger to our children walking or riding their bikes to school. The proposed hotel actually uses the bike path as a roadway for 63 yards to access their rear entrance. (The developer has indicated that this entrance will be locked, accessible only to emergency vehicles. However, fire trucks, ambulances, and police vehicles speeding down the kids’ bike path provide a dangerous scenario that could easily turn tragic.) Both the Tres Pinos Union School Board and the San Benito County Board of Education have written letters expressing their concerns about the safety of the children on the bike path in regard to this project.
– Tres Pinos is and has been out of compliance for adequate fire protection for many years. Adding the biggest hotel in the county to this potential tinderbox would only be adding fuel to the fire.
– The increased commercial traffic in a residential family neighborhood is unacceptable. The proposed hotel is being touted as a boon to the local wine industry. The developer’s plans call for a wine tasting room in the hotel itself. The developer, John Eade, was quoted last year in the Sunday Pinnacle as saying, “The wine people – everyone I’ve talked to – is really behind it. They would use something like this to anchor the wine tourism industry in this area.” Local wineries offer wine tasting during the daytime hours. This means that the “wine tourists” will be driving from winery to winery, drinking wine, driving back to the hotel during daytime hours and turning from Airline Highway onto Southside Road where the children’s bike path to school begins. This irregular five-way intersection is already dangerous enough. Adding wine tourists cruising through it on a daily basis is a disaster waiting to happen.
– Inadequate parking has been planned. The developer lists 52 parking spaces for 44 hotel rooms, a banquet room, a wine tasting room and employees. Whenever there is a function in the banquet room or wine tasting room, the overflow parking from dozens of cars would be parked in front of our homes.
– The noise and commercial lighting emitting from a 24-hour a day business is a terrible price for the families living surrounding the hotel to have to pay.
I’ve personally seen the plans for this proposed motel. Heck, I even have a copy of the blueprint site plan. A few days ago, I spoke on the phone to the senior planner of the project, Chuck Ortwein, and he told me that I probably know as much about the project as he does. Well, let me tell you, the idea of the project might be good for the county, but the location and services they are trying to force it into can’t support it, and the overwhelming majority of residents in Tres Pinos don’t want it. The parking lot lighting, the trash dumpsters, the lack of parking and the possibility of drunken drivers driving in front of our homes on their way back from wine tasting isn’t something that anyone wants to live next to.
And by the way, I still haven’t gotten a straight answer from anyone down at the planning department about what they’re going to drain the 50,000-gallon swimming pool into. (TPWD is in a sewer moratorium.) Do these people really think that their 1,500-gallon septic tank is going to hold 50,000 gallons? (Gee, maybe their septic tank is like one of those clown cars that an amazing number of clowns can get into.)
Tres Pinos residents have asked repeatedly that an environmental impact review be done. With this many traffic, water, sewer and mixed-use problems, an EIR would certainly be appropriate. However, our repeated written requests have fallen on deaf ears down at the planning department.
As far as the zoning goes, there are plenty of empty lots in the commercially zoned center of Tres Pinos and Hollister that should be developed before changing existing R-1 zoning. The general plan indicates that business growth belongs there. The proposed hotel would not be an island unto itself. Its noise and commercial lighting and traffic would affect all of the families living around it. So why ruin our quiet family neighborhood? Why should the developer have more rights than we do?
Since Tres Pinos is unincorporated, our little village would get no taxes or monies or benefits whatsoever from this hotel. Neither would the residents of Tres Pinos benefit from this hotel. It only adds negative impacts to us. Shouldn’t the people of Tres Pinos have a say in what happens to our town? Sure we should! Unfortunately, we aren’t allowed to vote on it.
And chew on this: does the county really want to reward the developer for disregard of local water and sewer ordinances, the safety of our school’s bike path, and of local families’ homes by changing the zoning and allowing this project to go through? Is this a good precedent the county wants to set?
We decided to live in Tres Pinos because of the rural residential quality of life here. My husband and I have been raising our four children here since they were born. We also have a dog, two cats, and a mortgage. We’ve put 22 years worth of money and sweat into renovations on our 120-year-old Victorian home, complete with a porch swing and white picket fence, working to live the American dream. We’ve planned our life having faith in the county’s general plan that our neighborhood would remain residential, and not simply change zoning to commercial because a developer bought a piece of land cheaply. Building the largest hotel in San Benito County with its cumulative intolerable and unacceptable problems, in a place where homes should be built, is something that would, quite simply, destroy our peaceful neighborhood.
This is a political decision that would change Tres Pinos forever if it is allowed to go through. Let the developer make his profit by putting a house onto the lot instead of the largest hotel in the county, since that is what it is zoned for. He can work a little harder to put his hotel project in a more appropriate place with available services. Now THAT would make sense for the county, the developer, and the residents of Tres Pinos.
Jamie Frusetta is a Tres Pinos housewife, mother and quiltmaker.
